Façades of The Hague #93

This is the public, free and unguarded bicycle storage behind Centraal Station at Rijnstraat, as seen in 2017.

It is in a small area that constantly slips from the attention of the city’s gentrifyers, while they are working hard on the area in front of the station to change that into a circus of zombie urbanism.

I must say the bike storage, or bike hotel as it is often called, and its surroundings are as ugly as ugly can be, but, in a way, i like it even more for it.

It has a gloomy character of greyness, of metal, concrete and of unruly traffic.

Under it are taxi ranks.

Some people leave their bikes in the storage as if it is an ominous asylum where you can leave your pet behind in anonymous solitude, while other bikes are just stolen.

But most people store their bikes there just for a day to catch their train or bus to their work, and in spite of the somewhat sinister atmosphere you can quite safely do so.

The bicycle is an almost integral part of the Dutch body and as bikes, being eco-friendly monsters, are becoming more important, earlier or later the town’s gentrifyers and managers will find a ‘solution’ for this rather grim place.

Let’s hope they won’t for now, as the more unsuspected, maybe even darker places of town are part of its ambiguous character.

© Villa Next Door 2019

All pictures were taken in March 2017.

Bertus Pieters

Façades of The Hague from #72 onwards: https://villanextdoor2.wordpress.com/category/facades-of-the-hague/

Façades of The Hague #1 – 71: https://villanextdoor.wordpress.com/category/facades-of-the-hague/

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William Kentridge, 10 Drawings for Projection; Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam

I visited Eye Filmmuseum to write a review about 10 Drawings for Projection by William Kentridge (1955) for Villa La Repubblica. Click here to read the review (in Dutch).

These pictures were made with the intention to give myself a mnemonic of what i had seen and experienced.

Even while trying to make a choice from them for this blog, i felt being under the spell of these ten impressive animations.

Inadequate as they are i hope these pics will inpire you to see the exhibition too; and don’t forget to take your time!

Click here to read the review in Villa La Repubblica (in Dutch)!

© Villa Next Door 2019

Contents of all photographs courtesy to William Kentridge and Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam

Bertus Pieters

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Lieven Hendriks & Thomas Trum, Modern Pictures for Modern Rooms; Billytown, The Hague

Modern Pictures for Modern Rooms was an exhibition in London in 1936 showing art buyers how to live with modern painting in a modern interior.

It happened to be the same year Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times was released;1936 was in the middle of the world wide economic crisis.

In Modern Times people are struggling to take part in the rat race for survival in times of modernism, while in London a gallery tried another strategy to sell modernist art to survive the crisis in a country with a predominantly conservative taste.

More than 80 years later we live in a post-postmodern era but we still feel the tremors of the great social, economic and artistic modernist age that was the 20^th century.

Rianne Groen – who closed down her gallery in Rotterdam only recently – co-operated with Billytown – the Hague platform that constantly struggles for new perspectives – to make a new Modern Pictures for Modern Rooms show with Lieven Hendriks (1970) and Thomas Trum (1989), in which she tries to take a fresh look at what decoration means in the context of art in daily life of the post-postmodern present.

Billytown’s space is hardly the place to create a cosy living room, but with some adaptations a place with familiar elements which suit a former school building was created as an environment for Hendriks’ and Trum’s works.

Abstraction (which historically became the hallmark of modernism) is clearly a principle of Trum’s lively material improvisations, while Hendriks brings back abstraction into hyper-reality with his trompe l’oeil paintings.

With its big windows the art doesn’t just seem to give context to Billytown’s space but also to the reality of street life outside the gallery.

Trum’s monumental One Purple Line seems to become part of the square outside Billytown.

left: Lieven Hendriks, right: Thomas Trum

© Villa Next Door 2019

Contents of all photographs courtesy to Lieven Handriks, Thomas Trum and Billytown, Den Haag

Bertus Pieters

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Melle de Boer, De laatste romantische schilder (The Last Romantic Painter); The Kitchen, Billytown, The Hague

Schneeige Nacht!
Ihr dunklen Schläfer
Unter der Brücke
Von Zerbrochener Stirne
Tropft kristallner Schweiß euch

(Snowy night! / You dark sleepers / Under the bridge / From your broken foreheads / Crystall sweat drips) Georg Trakl (1887-1914), Fragment 11

As you have seen in this blog (and if you haven’t, subscribe to Villa Nex Door!) Melle de Boer (1972) and your blogger met in his studio last spring to discuss his new paintings and painting in general.

Little did i know that an exhibition of his new paintings would follow so soon in Billytown’s Kitchen.

Its title The Last Romantic Painter may sound both tongue in cheek and pathetic, but that doesn’t mean this show isn’t serious stuff.

It might be tempting to compare De Boer’s paintings to his drawings and his work as a singer-songwriter, but let’s not do that, as there are no drawings or songs in this exhibition.

His paintings try to strike a balance between the escape from reality (whatever that is, in any guise or disguise) and the embrace of the reality of painting.

Many details of the works may work associative, on the other hand they are pure paint and brushstrokes etc.

In these paintings the nights may be snowy, the foreheads may be broken or the sweat may even be crystal, but in the end the paint dictates its own way of thinking.

I was quite happy seeing this exhibition, also knowing that the best has yet to come.

© Villa Next Door 2019

Contents of all photographs courtesy to Melle de Boer and Billytown, Den Haag

Bertus Pieters

VILLA NEXT DOOR IS NOT REPONSIBLE FOR ANY ADVERTISING ON THIS PAGE AND REGRETS ANY IRRITATION IT MAY CAUSE!

Façades of The Hague #92

Haan (Cock) by Jan Snoeck (1927-2018), Dr. J. Presserstraat corner Escamplaan.

The sculpture was placed in 1984.

Snoeck was a prolific artist who made many sculptures for public space, many of them with his recognisable tiles in lively colours.

In spite of their popular outlook his public sculptures (like this one) usually are a bit edgy as well.

This one, a bit tucked away in the bushes at an anonymous street corner, clearly needs some thorough restoration for its original shiny brilliance to return.

© Villa Next Door 2019

All pictures were taken in March 2017.

Bertus Pieters

Façades of The Hague from #72 onwards: https://villanextdoor2.wordpress.com/category/facades-of-the-hague/

Façades of The Hague #1 – 71: https://villanextdoor.wordpress.com/category/facades-of-the-hague/

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Graduation Festival 2019; Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague

I visited the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague to write a review about the graduation exhibition for Villa La Repubblica. Click here to read the review (in Dutch).

At the moment the original Academy building is being restored.

It is a state monument built in the 1930s and as such it needs to be handled with the utmost care.

As i have written quite extensively about the show in VLR i just leave you to see this visual safari in the building. Enjoy!

© Villa Next Door 2019

Content of all photographs courtesy to all artists and the Royal Academy of Art, Den Haag

Bertus Pieters

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Een nieuwe lente, een nieuw beeld (A New Spring, a New Vision); Galerie Helder, The Hague

Under a somewhat anachronistic title former teacher at the Royal Academy in The Hague Jan van der Pol has been given the opportunity at Galerie Helder to make an exhibition with some former students of the Academy.

For a change Van der Pol didn’t choose young and promising but midlife and – as we may hope – midcareer.

Channa Boon (1967), Eva Klee (1970), Rob Knijn (1966) and Arianne Olthaar (1970) are very different artists indeed and it is as if Van der Pol has tried to create a very wide ranging ensemble, reaching to the stars as well as to the intimacy of a home and walking the tightrope between reality and imagination (which is what art is usually about).

Olthaar shows a combination of the past and present in a scruffy space, once glittering and trendy, awaiting its final demolition, while Knijn, in some recent works, brings the world of stars and almost dreamy abstraction back to the reality of a framed painting on a wall, although even that doesn’t seem to be real reality.

Boon distorts reality with reality itself, blurring the already shaky line between reality and interpretation, while Klee defines the home as a small secluded clay space where the mind shapes its own raw bulbous forms, the human spirit as a clay pitcher.

It is a short running but interesting exhibition, coinciding with the opening of the graduation festival at the Royal Academy and The Hague Contemporary Art Weekend, only on show over the weekend.

© Villa Next Door 2019

Content of all photographs courtesy to all artists and Galerie Helder, Den Haag

Bertus Pieters

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Krijn Giezen and others, An Unusual Stroll; GEM, The Hague

Krijn Giezen (1939-2011) was one of my teachers at the Royal Academy in The Hague.

When he started teaching by the end of the 1970s, there was a kind of split between traditional craftsmanship and (traditionilised) conceptualism at the Academy, and there was little room for individual artistic development.

Both sides took themselves extremely seriously and Giezen, as a newcomer, didn’t seem to fit in very well.

He appealed to the inventiveness and imagination of his students, which was quite unusual at the time (and which is still, or again, a sensitive point at the Royal Academy and in education in general).

He didn’t care very much for technique or aesthetics, contrary to what we had learned so diligently.

“Make a chair!” he told us, for our first assignment.

Students who were all thumbs, like me, were initially shocked, but soon it became clear that it was nowhere necessary at all to construct a piece of furniture.

His ways of seeing and working didn’t influence me immediately, but later on they did so undeniably.

As a teacher he was easy going, accessible, good humoured and never imposing himself as the master who knows all.

That is also how his work looks like.

Giezen was very inquisitive about the playful en inventive aspects of humanity, again, not interested in technique or aesthetics, and extremely uninterested in financial and eternity values.

It is this warm-heartedness that shimmers through the present show of his work at GEM.

As a former student i just hope present viewers will feel the same pleasure i had looking at his works.

His pictures, documentation and objects are accompanied by works by artists of the present generation: Semâ Bekirović (1977), Paul Geelen (1983), Bram De Jonghe (1985) and Chaim van Luit (1985).

An excellent choice as there is a good dialogue between these and Giezen’s works.

It also goes to show that Giezen’s works are still very much of our time.

Content of all photograph courtesy to all artists, the estate of Krijn Giezen, the owners of the works and GEM, Den Haag

Bertus Pieters

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Façades of The Hague #91

Small sculpture, probably representing Hop-‘o-My-Thumb, by Tom Otterness (1952), Harteveltstraat, in front of Museum Beelden aan Zee.

Otterness, who started his career with amongst others the questionable video Dog Shot Film in 1977, made this far more endearing small sculpture (2004) as part of a number of fairy tale figures along the coast next to the museum.

The small sculpture used to stand in front of the museum’s entrance, but was recently removed to stand more near his fellow sculptures, pointing towards the museum (as can be seen in the last pictures).

First four pictures were taken in March 2017, last three pictures were taken in June 2019

Bertus Pieters

Façades of The Hague from #72 onwards: https://villanextdoor2.wordpress.com/category/facades-of-the-hague/

Façades of The Hague #1 – 71: https://villanextdoor.wordpress.com/category/facades-of-the-hague/

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Peter Zwaan, Skins; HOK Gallery, The Hague

There is only one big purpose in nature: staying alive at all cost, even if the time span of life itself may vary from just a few hours to more than a millennium.

The main methods nature uses seem to be coincidence and chance. Everything around us happens to be as it is.

Mind you, if evolution had – again, by chance – taken another route, forced by circumstances, we might have looked and felt quite differently (or we might not have existed at all).

In fact nature’s toolbox gives almost infinite possibilities and variations of how we, living beings, look like and what attracts and repels us to make us mentally function in life.

As human beings we can even play a bit with that toolbox and with artificial materials. Peter Zwaan (1968) makes works that give you an idea of evolution-gone-wrong.

Paper becoming skin, beer cans growing skin with birthmarks and hair or the idea of fish fingers taken quite literally, Zwaan makes it all and shows it in a retrospective at HOK Gallery.

Especially on a hot summer day in the tiny gallery – of barely 120 square feet –, you may doubt if you smell your own sweat or that of Zwaan’s works.

Zwaan takes the fun quite seriously which makes his works both attractive and repulsive.

After seeing Zwaan’s work, drinking from a beer can won’t be the same experience anymore.

The show also proves that a retrospective doesn’t necessarily need a lot of space and hundreds of works.

Also in that respect HOK gallery and Zwaan have succeeded in making a good and imaginative show.

Content of all photograph courtesy to Peter Zwaan and HOK Gallery, Den Haag

Bertus Pieters

VILLA NEXT DOOR BARES NO RESPOSIBILITY FOR ANY ADVERTISING ON THIS PAGE!

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